Pay You…Say Me…Together, Naturally!

“I’ve been a Felon with you
Inside my mind
And in my Seams I’ve Lined your Beans 
A thousand times
I sometimes see you
Pass on by our Store
Hello!
Is it ”C” (content) you’re looking for?
I can see it in your eyes
I can see it in your smile
$s are all I ever wanted
And my  Tills are open wide
Because you know just when to Pay
And too when just Not To 
And I want to tell you so much
We Need You…”

I start with all due apologies to Mr. Richie (and the lyricist), for distorting the classic lyrics. It was too much of a temptation to resist, a la Cadbury’s© Bournville®, possibly!

Are users going to “Pay” for content or “Not”? It’s an area more grey than hedge-funds & the pre-crash financial Jalebis. The difference is – it’s not hurting the “public”, yet.

Debates are raging fiercer than Spanish or Californian wildfires. Businesses have shut shops. Thousands have lost jobs. Governments too have cut in, at times. Still, there’s not a damned clue or consensus on the matter. Yet.

Even within each affected corporation there are too many yet-to-be-decided-or-yet-to-be-frozen revenue-models/ plans! Almost of Yeti-ish proportions! They give us the shivers… ‘coz at the end of the day, they all are about “Pay YOU….Say ME”.

McKinsey has put up (for Free), slivers of a debate on the issue on McKinsey Digital.  Incidentally they have raised their whisper (about Premium Membership) to almost a scream lately. There are still free content. But such gossamer “slices” might be just right only as adornments for Qatar airline’s famed starters! No, I have not ordered a “meal”. YET.

The skirmishes are based mainly on two fronts. The physical formats (papers, discs etc.) and the web-based content. Borrowing from the article and I quote ”People will pay for content if it is necessary, irreplaceable, and unshareable“, as per Clay Shirky. Basically it’s a free-lunch. Snapped away without second thoughts. Thank you pay shirky…, but you are probably right, to some extent.

Mr. Brill, on the other side is simply not ready to take a chill pill. He’ll yield the sword and behead the web-mongrel if he could. If he only could. However, Steve too agrees on Clay’s concrete observation about content (quoted above). We do too.

It seems, thanks to the two distinctly different battle-fronts, that there’s quite a lot of ground which is missing. In-between.

Drawing parallels, it’ll be the “virgin” markets which definitely will make the difference, just as with economy. So, if revenue sources need to be realigned, so be it! IF lack of knowledge (about those weird virgin markets) is what’s stopping the yets from becoming yeps, then the disease is fully curable. It may be important to remember though, that in “underdeveloped” markets, “arranged-marriages” are norms. So, deflower the bride after you’ve been through the right process only. And – no kinky stuff to start with please! Breaking-in takes some time here, still.

Now that the stinky stuff have been dealt with, we can look at the  ”cloudy” part of the problem. Cobwebs are visible only after they have gathered enough grime! Guess that’s what happened with the world-wide-web too. The bloody “thing” is so high up that we are simply unable to reach it with our existing vacuum nozzles!

Going back to Clay’s irrefutable logic, I wonder why we still pay for certain services? Why is it that we are still ready to pay with our lives for our loved ones? Why don’t we all have kitchen-gardens or fish-tanks? Why doesn’t every Arab pump out gas off his/her backyard? How come we expect our pay-cheques before the month rolls over?

There ARE simple, basic tenets about content consumption which we may have forgotten while we were busy migrating our mailboxes to the berry. The postman will probably ring twice, giving us another chance!

I am  too big a Lionel Richie fan to end without more of his lyrics. Here goes…

“I had a dream I had an awesome dream
People in the park playing games in the dark
And what they played was a masquerade
And from behind the walls of doubt a voice was crying out
Pay Us, Say We….“